FACE OFF Lords of The Fallen: PS4 vs Xbox One

Beginning life as a PS3 and Xbox 360 project, Lords of the Fallen and its proprietary Fledge engine underwent a dramatic transformation during production, pushed forward onto the new wave of consoles. The team at Deck13 has delivered an advanced visual experience with a focus on high-quality volumetric lighting, GPU-accelerated physics and a swathe of Nvidia Gameworks-exclusive features - in fact, the results partially call to mind the impressive Elemental demo used to showcase Unreal Engine 4. There's no doubt the final result is often gorgeous but, unfortunately, these cutting-edge features come at a steep price, severely impacting game performance.
In what has become a bit of a standard announcement these days, the developers confirmed in September that Lords of the Fallen operates at 1080p on PlayStation 4 and 900p on Xbox One, and we can confirm that this is the case - not that the presentation is immediately obvious. In fact, first impressions actually suggest something below the suggested resolutions, with all the hallmarks of upscaling present on both consoles. The presentation is so murky, we actually had to fall back on good old-fashioned pixel-counting to absolutely confirm the resolution.
So what's going on? Well, Deck13 went a bit overboard with its implementation of chromatic aberration, to the point that the end results give the impression of a significantly lower resolution. We aren't huge fans of this type of filter, but it has its place - unfortunately, we can't help feel that an ancient monastery isn't the best venue for it. In Lords of the Fallen, the aberration is sometimes absurd to the point that it feels as if we were meant to don a pair of anaglyph 3D glasses.
Thankfully, the effect can be disabled on PC, but at the moment this requires users to disable post-processing effects across the board, eliminating other, more desirable effects in the process, including anti-aliasing. It's a shame the developers didn't provide an option to specifically disable chromatic aberration and leave the rest. Bearing in mind how much the game has changed via two patches since launch, hopefully they will consider adding this feature.
Moving on, the visual quality of the two console versions appears extremely similar, apart from a reduction in shadow quality and light glow on Xbox One. Shadow resolution is reduced significantly in comparison to the PS4 version, producing noticeable chunkiness in many scenes. As the game features an array of shadow-casting spot and box-lights, this difference leaves certain scenes looking decidedly inferior on Xbox One. The PC offers the best quality in this area - better-defined shadows and more of them. This manifests in the form of equipment shadows on character models: shields, pieces of cloth and more all present proper shadows on PC, while on console only the base character mesh minus accessories casts a shade.



Lords of the Fallen - the Digital Foundry verdict

Looking at the two console versions it's rather difficult to give a solid recommendation here as neither version performs well. Image quality is certainly superior on PS4 and, while performance is quite similar, screen tear is more noticeable. On the other hand, the Xbox One version suffers from more severe judder and its frame-rate dips even lower than the sub-optimal PS4 version. Both versions are playable but neither feels enjoyable as a result of the low frame-rate and inconsistent performance. We'd give the nod to the PS 4 version if pressed, but we can't help feel this is not the way the game should be played.
That particular honour goes to the PC version of Lords of the Fallen. It's a demanding title, but even middling hardware should be able to achieve a more stable 30fps than the consoles - and without the intrusive tearing. It's just a shame that the finished product ended up shipping with so many performance problems as the game itself is actually rather well made and definitely worth playing. For now, we can only hope that Deck13 concentrates on optimising console performance.

1080p vs 900p
Ombre migliori su Ps4 (di molto)
Frame rate migliore su Ps4
tearing leggermente meno visibile su One

Certo che non si possono vedere ancora giochi che non tengono i 30fps e con problemi di tearing